Recent advances and improvements in communications technology provide the communications industry with an enormous number of opportunities to improve existing services and to branch into new service areas. For instance, thousands of miles of fiber optic cable have been deployed in optical networks. These optical networks make possible the transmission of large amounts of information at great speeds and are used to carry voice signals, data, and video.
The management and monitoring of a large optical network, or other types of large networks, can be difficult and expensive. One factor contributing to the cost of maintaining and operating large optical networks is the lack of reliable data regarding installed network equipment. In many networks, databases storing information regarding the type of installed equipment and the configuration of the devices are maintained manually. In many cases, manually maintaining this type of data causes it to be unreliable. Therefore, in many situations, a service technician must be dispatched to the physical location of a network device to verify the existence of the device and its configuration before any changes may be made to the network. Sending a technician to the physical location of the equipment in this manner is time consuming and expensive.
While methods and systems do exist that allow technicians to remotely determine the existence and configuration of a network device, these systems also allow a user to make changes to the configuration of the network device. For instance, the transaction one (“TL1”) protocol allows users to remotely gain access to network elements and to execute commands on the network elements. Through the use of TL1, the existence and configuration of devices on an optical network may be determined. However, providing access to network elements to a user through the use of the TL1 language provides the user with the ability to make changes to the configuration of the network elements. Allowing a user to make changes to the network equipment in this manner opens a network up to the possibility of inadvertent or malicious modification of the configuration of network elements. In many situations, a malicious user with access to the configuration of network elements through the TL1 protocol could render an entire network useless by issuing only a few commands.
Therefore, in light of the above, there is a need for a method and system for providing access to network element configuration data that will provide easy access to accurate information regarding the installation and configuration of network data equipment without requiring a technician to physically visit the location of the equipment. Moreover, there is a need for a method and system for providing access to network element configuration data that can provide data regarding the existence and configuration of network elements without also allowing users to execute commands or modify the configuration of the equipment.